The Jeff Bezos way

Leadership Lessons from Jeff Bezos and Amazon
Posted May 12, 2015 by Safari Books Online & filed under Amazon, Business, Content - Highlights and Reviews, culture, leadership, management, strategy.

 

By Theodore Kinni

Theodore Kinni has written, ghosted, or edited more than 20 business books. He was book review editor for strategy+business for 7 years.

 

I’ve been waiting for Amazon—with its annual sales of almost $90 billion in 2014—to crash and burn for a long time. There was no way that a public company could continue to operate almost entirely without profit year after year—Amazon lost $241 million in 2014. I was positive that a reckoning was just around the corner. Now, 20 years down the road, and before Jeff Bezos dispatches a fleet of delivery drones to bombard me with the company’s ubiquitous shipping cartons, I hereby publicly and unconditionally surrender. Never again will I mutter—even under my breath—about the company’s prospects.

No matter what you think of Amazon, it is clear that it is a juggernaut of a company—and that its leaders play a big role in its ability to generate topline growth. That’s why it’s worth reading The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company by John Rossman. Rossman, who was formerly Amazon’s director of enterprise services and now serves as managing director of professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal, says that the principles he describes in the book were embedded in the corporate culture by founder Bezos and remain the “core tenets on which company leaders are rigorously rated during their annual performance reviews and self-evaluations.” Here are a few that are especially notable—not so much for their commonsensical nature, but for the diligence with which the company pursues them:

 

Obsess Over the Customer: Not surprisingly from a company that rewrote the book on retailing (driving myriad competitors in segments such as books and music out of business altogether), Amazon’s first leadership tenet dictates an intense focus on the customer. Rossman writes that Bezos has always maintained that the “best customer service is no customer service.” This koan-like statement means that Amazon seeks to always give its customers exactly what they want the first time around, which eliminates a whole bunch of problems—and costs—from the get go. That’s why the company instituted policies like the then-innovative free shipping on orders over $100 program, “Look Inside the Book” previews, and Amazon Prime, which has become a major revenue generator in its own right...read the rest here